Why didnt Einstein get a nobel prize for (e=mc2) but for his photo electric effect?

Answer 1

Yeh, interesting question. Here is a good response, taken from the Boston Globe:

Sort of, but as is so often the case, it's a little more subtle than a simple yes/no answer.

Einstein did receive the Nobel prize in physics in 1921, and the actual citation from the Nobel committee was ''for services to Theoretical Physics, and especially of the law of the photoelectric effect."

During 1905 alone Einstein probably made enough scientific leaps to justify three Nobel prizes, writing several papers that would change the world. Certainly the case could be made that he should have had several more for work done afterward, but most people like to think of that year as ''the big one" that made certain he would get a Nobel prize no matter what.

One 1905 paper dealt with the ''photoelectric effect" and is the work that was clearly cited for the prize. In this work he showed that, although most scientists believed light acted like a wave, one must also at times treat light as being made of little chunks of electromagnetic energy called photons. This was the beginning of the strange subject of quantum mechanics which made it essential to drop many preconceived notions of what made sense in order to really understand how the world worked.

Another paper of 1905 introduced Einstein's special theory of relativity (special in that it could not deal with acceleration, but only with constant velocity's) and introduced the radical idea of merging space and time into one thing: space-time.

Yet another 1905 paper showed that one could infer the existence of atoms -- something still controversial at the time -- by looking at the random motion of grains of pollen in a drop of water.

Einstein kept working to develop his general theory of relativity, which extended the special theory to include acceleration and gravity, but this took a bit of time to get sorted out -- it was published in 1915 and introduced the idea of curved space-time.

This list of achievements is nowhere near complete, but space restrictions make me stop here.

Many people feel that the Nobel committee wanted to hedge its bets a bit by just picking out just one of the mind-blasting 1905 breakthroughs (which were all still controversial 15 years later) and lumping the rest together as ''Theoretical Physics." Oddly enough, it's the ideas of quantum mechanics, ushered in by the Nobel-cited photoelectric effect paper, that are perhaps the most controversial today!

Answer 2

Nobel Prize For Photoelectric Effect

Answer 3

The reason that Einstein did not get a Nobel prize for E= M x C^2 is because he did not originate the formula contrary to what is the common belief.